BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 165 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

January 17, 2007

Digital real estate photography: Which photographer? Which camera?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The current issue of The Specialist, the official magazine of The Council of Residential Specialists, insists that “99 percent of home buyers say that photos are the most helpful feature on a Realtor’s web site.” I’m pretty much convinced that 47% of all statistics are made up on the spot, but I suppose that recalcitrant one percent is visually impaired or something.

In any case, I have two things to say about photography:

First, Karl Hoelscher is starting a real estate photography business in North Phoenix, and he would love to have some help honing his marketing message. Give him a look at HomeSnapz.com. Even if you use your own photos for your web pages, super-hi-resolution professional photography can work wonders for your printed pieces and MLS listings.

Second, the article I mentioned in The Specialist is a wonderful example of really bad advice. As we talked about in BloodhoundBlog months ago, the two most important features in a camera to be used for everyday real estate work are a wide-angle lens and a fairly small image size:

Except for print reproduction, the best size for a real estate photo is 640 x 480 pixels — which is 0.3 megapixels. Ideally, your everyday camera should be able to produce that size image without post-processing. The photos on your web pages can be bigger than this, but not by much. If you try to load 20 images on a page, with each image weighing in at one megabyte or more, you’ll overtax most web browsers — well after you’ve overtaxed the patience of your audience.

What you want from a lens is not a long zoom but the widest possible angle. Most digital cameras have their widest angle setting at 45 – 55mm, if the lens were on a 35mm film-camera equivalent. A few cameras get down to 38mm. This is inadequate. What you want is 28mm or less — with reservations.

The features camera-makers advertise, megapixels and zoom lenses, are mostly useless for taking photos of homes.

So what does The Specialist suggest you buy? Cameras with long zoom lenses and massively megapixelated images — just exactly the Read more

January 17, 2007

Celebrating the spirit of transparent real estate weblogging: BloodhoundBlog can and will do more . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m thinking that I should take a much larger role in the growth of the RE.net. Many people are convinced that hundreds of agents and lenders will be starting real estate weblogs in the coming year. That may or may not be so, but it is a certainty that the sharks are circling in the water, looking for another pound of flesh. I don’t absolutely hate vendor involvement in the real estate blogging world, but I’d like to do what I can to make sure people are getting what they’re paying for — and not paying to have smoke blown up their… noses.

Moreover, I am very concerned that new entrants will miss the forest in a quest for leads. There is nothing wrong with forging business relationships through weblogs, but we will kill everything if the RE.net comes to be seen, in consumers’ eyes, as just another spamvertising channel. Weblogging is about the good, the true and the beautiful first, and only secondarily about commerce. If we screw this up, it won’t work — not for commerce and not for anything.

I’ve talked with Brian Brady about doing blogging seminars, and I’ve traded email with other RE.net luminaries on the subject. For the moment, I feel like this is overkill. Arranging an event is a logistical nightmare, and, even then, it’s tough to get enough people together to make a dent in the problem. Worse yet, somebody has to pay for a seminar, either the attendees or a sponsor.

But what’s really needed is already here: Weblogs, podcasts and video podcasts. For now, I’m going to start putting together a basic set of tools in weblog and podcast form. As these materials start to gel, we’ll go buy some video studio time and commit the more important ideas to video podcasts. Maybe in the long run, we’ll produce a DVD or CD, but my thinking, for now at least, is that the best medium for discussing the world wide web is the world wide web.

But wait. There’s more. I’m going to start a meme game that we can use to catalog the RE.net Read more

January 16, 2007

ShackPrices.com: Anything but ORdinary . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Responding to my kvetching last night, ShackPrices.com today launched itself into a new ORbit among map-based real estate search pORtals — with OR without MLS access. Not satisfied with ORdinary searching, the Seattle-based company yesterday added a loosely-structure keywORd search. The search suppORted the AND and NOT logical operatORs, but the OR operatOR was left on the cutting room floOR.

Until today, that is. This is email from ShackPrices.com co-founder Doug Cole:

Doug here (the other half of ShackPrices), thanks for the kind words, just thought I’d let you know we just added the OR operator to ShackPrices, so now something like “fixer or tlc” works. Also to clarify we don’t have a way to group words together yet, so the example in your post the search “waterfront, -shake roof” actually goes through more like “waterfront and roof, not shake”. It’s something I’d really like to fix soon, but we have to pick our battles since there are only two of us, and that one missed the first round.

So: I immediately put the booger to the test. This is from my FindTenants bot, which runs on the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service. The actual bot is much more stringent than this, but what is shown here is a search that is run into the Realtor’s Remarks section of the listing to determine if a potential investment property is in fact tenant-occupied:

rented OR leased OR renter OR long term renter OR long-term renter OR tenant OR lease ends OR lease agreement OR tenants in place OR rented OR leased OR lease until OR lease til

What did ShackPrices.com turn up? Rain, snow — and tenants…

Technorati Tags: , ,

January 15, 2007

Mapping, schmapping — ShackPrices.com is keyword searchable . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

ShackPrices.com has added keyword searching to its map-based real estate searching tool. In addition to searching by location, amenities or price, home shoppers can search for any text that might appear in the MLS listing made available to ShackPrices.com: Subdivision or neighborhood names, types of architecture, roofing materials or anything that appears in the remarks section of the listing.

Vide licet:

  • Any words in the agent description
  • Project name (Emerald Court Townhomes, Madrona Annex, etc.)
  • Status (subject to inspection, active, etc.)
  • Waterfront (lake, ocean, creek, etc.)
  • Parking (carport, garage, etc.)
  • Architecture (colonial, craftsman, etc.)
  • Site features (hot tub, cabana, disabled access, Fenced fully, etc.)
  • Terms (variable price, lease/purchase, owner financing, etc.)
  • View (sound, golf course, mountain, etc.)
  • Exterior (brick, stucco, wood, etc.)
  • Interior (2nd kitchen, sauna, high tech cabling, etc.)
  • Style (split entry, townhouse, etc.)
  • Pool (above ground, indoor, etc.)
  • Flooring (slate, carpet, etc.)
  • Roof (cedar shake, composition, metal, etc.)
  • Appliances (double oven, dishwasher, etc.)
  • Energy Source (electric, natural gas, etc.)
  • Heating/Cooling: (heat pump, radiator, forced air, etc.)

So far, there are two logical operators in the text search function, AND and NOT. So “waterfront, shake roof” (omitting the quotes) would find listings which had the word waterfront AND the phrase shake roof in the listing. But “waterfront, -shake roof” would find listing that had waterfront but did NOT have shake roof in the text of the listings. (I believe I am misrepresenting this; your mileage may vary.) I have already started the wheedling campaign for an OR operator, because many true MLS searches are highly OR-dependent.

Here’s my take: ShackPrices.com started good and is getting better at a nice clip. I want them in Phoenix…

Technorati Tags: ,

January 15, 2007

It turns out we ain’t nothin’ but a hound dawg . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you bet on Brian Brady’s “Predatory Lending” post to take the real estate blog carnival trifecta, you could be sleeping in the dog house tonight — or perhaps “Heartbreak Hotel.”

Brian won the BloodhoundBlog Carnival by a unanimous vote.

He placed in The Carnival of Real Estate Investing, held this week at Sadie’s Take on Delaware Ohio.

But Elvis left the building without taking note of Brian’s effort at The Carnival of Real Estate at Marlow Harris’ 360 Digest.

Oh, well. By now we know the formula at Marlow’s places: A little more bite and a little less bark, a little less fight and a little more spark. We’ll do better next time…

Technorati Tags: , ,

January 15, 2007

Not an iHouse but, rather, “I, House”: Tradesmen to Asimove over for robotic home construction . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Engadget:

“Your shoes, clothes and car are already made automatically, but your house is built by hand and it doesn’t make sense.” That’s word from Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, whose team at USC is getting ready to debut a $1.5 million robot designed to build homes with zero help from puny humans. The bot should have its first test run in California this April, where it will build the shell of a two-story house in 24 hours. The operation is akin to a 3D inkjet printer, with the robot moving about in three dimensional space, spraying out the home layer by layer. Part of the simplicity of the process comes from the simplicity of the materials: nearly the whole house is built with concrete and gypsum, obviously leaving a bit of work for the decorators, but allowing for complicated shapes and cheap construction — about a fifth of current costs.

Don’t know about the architecture, but I love the idea of a home that won’t burn, won’t rot, won’t warp and won’t look like Thanksgiving Dinner for insects…

Much more: Flash demo.

Technorati Tags: , ,

January 14, 2007

Apple iPhone round-up . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is nothing like everything, just a summary of news — and comic relief — of interest to the real estate community.

Dave Winer, among others, objects to the idea of the iPhone being a closed box. Okayfine. But it’s important for end-users to understand that the iPhone will run any server-side application that can run on the Safari web browser. Smart-phone apps are notoriously lame because of the memory restrictions of the device. We’re already using lots of server-based applications — our MLS system, plus all of the Realty.bots — and the immediate challenge is to get mission-critical web vendors to support Safari.

David Pogue at The New York Times weighs in with The Ultimate iPhone FAQ.

The Phoenix Real Estate Guy has a link to a fawning video from CBS News.

PressReal.com has heard the iPhone calling.

iFun: The Late Late Show, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Saturday Night Live.

Technorati Tags: , ,

January 12, 2007

Blogs can help Realtors connect with communities

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me from this morning’s Arizona Republic (permanent link). Sadly for the weblogs mentioned here, I did a much better job of linking than the newspaper did — even on-line.

 
Blogs can help Realtors connect with communities

The year just past may have been the Year of the Real Estate Blogger — or it may turn out that that title will belong to the year just begun.

We operate a site called BloodhoundBlog, and the Valley is considered by many to be the epicenter of real estate blogging.

What’s a blog? It’s a cross between a newspaper and an online journal, with entries exhibited in reverse chronological order. But more than that, a blog is a community, with posters and commenters creating a conversation within a blog, and, ultimately, a conversation among blogs.

About 20 Phoenix-area bloggers attended a real estate blogging forum hosted last Friday by BloodhoundBlog blogger Brian Brady at the downtown Phoenix public library.

The event was a sort of get-acquainted meeting, with the attending bloggers introducing themselves and talking about their blogging experiences. Brady anticipates coordinating events like this on a quarterly basis.

My wife and business partner Cathleen Collins and I were there, along with Jay Thompson of The Phoenix Real Estate Guy and Jonathan Dalton of The Phoenix Arizona Real Estate Blog. Many of the bloggers present wrote blog posts about the event.

I spoke at some length about the push toward local content and local interest for real estate blogs.

Until now, much of the focus of real estate blogging has been on national and industry-related issues. Bloggers are working hard to discover new ways to serve their local communities.

Afterward, Brian, Cathleen and I spoke about big-picture issues relating to real estate blogging. One thought we had was to emulate the “Bloginars” held in Seattle and other cities by Dustin Luther and Russ Cofano of Rain City Guide. The objective would be to help Realtors, lenders and other real estate professionals learn how to connect with the community through real estate blogs.

What’s the benefit for the consumer? Eliminating the risk of the unknown quantity. You can shop for your next Realtor or Read more

January 11, 2007

Real estate in Deadwood: How Fremont Street in Las Vegas became a ghost town . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My mother gives us money for Christmas every year. This year we used the lucre to buy seasons one and two of Deadwood, the acclaimed HBO television series about gold-mining, lawlessness and profanetasizing — a condition afflicting screen writers, who pretend to affect to believe that people in the past were even worse potty-mouths than they are. In any case, the show is filled with dubious real estate deals, just the thing to keep us entertained as we wait for the next purple outburst.

Here’s an example: In the first few episodes, laconic hero Seth Bullock and his more loquacious partner Sol Star rent a lot for their hardware store from Al Swearengen — pimp, faro hustler, saloon keeper and curator and conservator of the Deadwood Hall of Fame of Outrageous Profanity.

What’s the rent? Twenty dollars. A day.

Deadwood is growing fast, and the bloom is barely off the boom. This is a seller’s market such as we have never seen. So when Bullock and Star offer to pay $1,000 to buy the lot free and clear, in fee simple — what should Swearengen do?

It’s worth $600 a month in rent. Potentially, it’s worth $7,200 a year. Why would Swearengen sell it at all? Why wouldn’t he lease it to the hardware store? They can improve it all they want, but those improvements and the underlying dirt would revert to his control when the lease terminated.

Better yet, why not write a participation lease? The hardware store planned to sell much-needed equipment to the prospective prospectors arriving by the dozens in Deadwood every day. Why wouldn’t Swearengen want to cut himself into a piece of that action, in exchange for surrendering for a term the right of possession to his lot?

If we stipulate that a gold rush is a short-term phenomenon, this would have been Swearengen’s optimal strategy for maximizing his own profit from the lot.

But what happens when a short-term windfall turns into a long-term travesty?

Last week I wrote about two multi-billion dollar multi-use projects being built on Las Vegas Boulevard — “The Strip.” Kirk Kerkorian’s MGM-Mirage will spend $7 billion to build Read more

January 10, 2007

If it’s Wednesday, there must be another dog in our house . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is our son Cameron with a two-year-old Bloodhound bitch we adopted today. She came to us with the name Ritz, but I have chosen to denominate her Ophelia because I can’t stand for dogs I like to have dumb names. Her original owners were not able to take her along when they moved, so Ophelia became dog number five for us.

During the French Revolution, the worthy humanitarians who brought us the Reign of Terror took it into their heads that Bloodhounds were insufferable symbols of the nobility. In consequence, they set about to exterminate the breed. They were so successful that, when a semblance of sanity was restored in France, breeders were forced to mix other lines with the surviving Bloodhounds to bring back the breed. If you look closely at Ophelia, you can see that she is much closer to her Coonhound forebears than is the much larger, much deeper-chested Odysseus. The white on her chest and paws is another throwback to Coonhound ancestry.

We have an English Coonhound named Desdemona, and it’s amazing to see how similar these two dogs are. Ophelia is smart and fun-loving and eager to please. We’ll see if she has a future in advertising…

Amending this: We haven’t seen the papers on this dog yet, but we’re convinced she’s a Redbone Coonhound.

January 9, 2007

Time mag on the iPhone . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Very worth reading.

Does this phone obsolete the Zune? Duh. The iPod line? Much of it. All other smart phones? Ancient history. Tablet computers? Most. Laptops? Lots of them. This is the first expression of the convergent mobile device — maybe the practical expression of convergence, period.

Next: Mad scrambling to knock off a device protected by 200 patents.

Then: Better versions of the iPhone from Apple.

If vertical markets were not infested with mental midgets who write MSIE-only crap, this might have been the silver bullet for Microsoft. It may turn out to be that yet.

This was a big day…

Technorati Tags: ,

« Older posts Newer posts »

Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

Media Contacts